In this article I am going to introduce you to KPlato, its installation and features.

Installation

KPlato is part of the KOffice office suite. So if you have KOffice on your machine, you have KPlato. If you do not have KOffice, follow these steps:

1. Open up Synaptic (or your favorite Add/Remove Software tool).
2. Do a search for “koffice” (no quotes).
3. Select koffice for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. If you go to the Applications > Office menu you should see KPlato listed. Click on it to fire the management tool up.

The interface

Figure 1

When you first fire up KPlato you will be introduced to a pseudo-wizard (see Figure 1) that will ask you if you want to look at your recent documents, open a previous documents, or start a new document based on a template.

To start a new file, based on a template, click on either the Plain or the 8 Hour Day/40 Hour workweek template. Let’s open up the latter and begin a project.

Here are the steps to creating/managing a project:

1. Define tasks

2. Estimate effort to perform each task.

3. Allocate resources for task.

4. Schedule the project according to the dependency network and resource availability.

Let’s create a project shall we?

Defining a task

Figure 2

The first thing to do is to click on the Tasks entry in the left pane (after you have selected a Template from the “wizard” screen. Once you have done that click the Add Task button (see Figure 2) which will add a line item across the middle and right pane of the main window. Now do the following:

1. Give the task a name.
2. Set the Estimate Type to “duration”.
3. Set Estimate to “8 hours”.
4. Set Contraint to “As soon as possible”.
5. Click the Schedules entry in the Left pane.
6. Click Add Schedules (which will create a line item).
7. Click the Calculate button.

Your task is now scheduled to begin at 12 am and last for 8 hours.  This task, of course, is very basic. You can always break the task down into smaller, constituent parts. Say, for example, your project is cleaning house. You can break this down into rooms or chores and then allocate resources (family members for example) to each room. You can then add resources such as mops, wash cloths, brooms, dusters, etc and allocate them to rooms or family members.

Figure 3

You can allocate these resources by clicking on the Dependencies (Graph), double-clicking on the task you want to allocate resources to, and then clicking on the Resources tab in the new window. As you can see (in Figure 3) I am allocating worker Jack with Tools Broom, Dustpan,and Vacuum for his task in cleaning the Basement.

Final thoughts

There are tons of features offered by KPlato – many of which will only be appreciated by those deeply familiar with project management tools. But even those without a deep understanding of such tools can take advantage of KPlato. It’s an outstanding tool that can give a business (or home) a solid project management tool without having to spend any of your fiscal resources to implement.

Some fields, like the hard drives, display the free space and an overlay bar that is showing the amount of used space on that drive. The program window can be moved around on the desktop and set to “always on top” if so desired.

The appearance can be customized. The user can change fonts, the sizes, the transparency level, and various colors to make it fit his needs.

Additional information can be retrieved by right-clicking on an entry that is displayed. A right-click on Processes displays all running processes on the system with an option to kill selected ones. Most fields contain those additional information which allow a quick analysis.

The tool uses roughly 6 Megabytes and 3 Megabytes of virtual memory when displaying all fields on the desktop. That’s impressive. Currently two versions are available at the developer’s homepage. One is for subscribers only (it’s free) which adds a few features like a horizontal layout.

The first one became my favorite as soon as I came across it not long ago. Called Design Float, this website is based on digging system (honestly a clone) but with the content range limited to design only. Despite being aimed at design in general rather than web design only, most of the content published till present is related to the web and computer graphics.

Especially often people publish different sorts of useful lists of services you would normally hardly hit on by accident, like a list of online color tools for example. So far I’ve found quite a bunch of interesting resources thanks to the filtering that shows the best content. Watching this web grow in size slowly, I wish it wouldn’t get spoiled by the not-so-perfect digging (or floating in this case) system during longer time period. RSS feeds for different categories are available.

Another useful website is actually a simple list called For Web Designers rather than a complex site. Although it was IMHO built especially for the purpose of earning money using 4 small-size banners sitting right at the top, it still does provide links that may be eventually found useful by many. Tutorials, tools, free resources, validators and generators, all at your disposal in one place. Over 500 links so far, tag cloud for easier search is present as well.

The last one, Clean CSS is an online CSS optimizer and formatter (not a validator though). Upload your style sheet, select options and level of “compression” and get the result in a downloadable form. Light-weight code, more satisfied surfers.